To Kill a Mockingbird: Where Tears Go

A wonderful, even magical, attribute of reading is that each individual’s reading experience is unique.  As English novelist Angela Carter states, “Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.  You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world.  You bring your history and you read it in your own time.” Every reading experience is unique to the individual, dependent on each individual’s unique life experiences.  In the same way, I believe no individual reads a text the same way twice.  Even if an individual has read a text before, revisiting the text with new life experiences creates a new perspective, a new lens, through which the reader absorbs the text in a new way.  I found this true as I read “To Kill a Mockingbird” for the third time.  Even though I had enjoyed the novel in my past readings, the life events I experienced between my last reading and now enabled me to approach the text with a new perspective, gaining insight from new passages and finding myself drawn to parts of the novel I previously regarded as  inconsequential or irrelevant. 

“‘Things haven’t caught up with this one’s instinct yet.  Let him get a little older and he won’t get sick and cry.  Maybe things’ll strike him as being---not quite right, say, but he won’t cry, not when he gets a few years on him…Cry about the simple hell people give other people---without even thinking.  Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they’re people, too” (p.201).  Embedded in a passage of dialogue between Mr. Dolphus Raymond, Dill, and Scout, these lines of text present an intriguing question concerning the “coming-of-age” experience.  Dill, presented in the text as young and somewhat naïve concerning the workings of Maycomb court, cannot understand why the town prosecutor, Mr. Gilmer, treats the black defendant Tom Robinson condescendingly.  Dill’s frustration and unbelief boils into tears. Scout attempts to dry these tears through an explanation that Mr. Gilmer’s behavior is accepted because it is the way whites have always treated blacks in the town, it is simply the way things are. 

While Scout cannot understand Dill’s confusion, Mr. Raymond, a man known for his fraternization with the black community and his drinking, understands the inability of the innocent to accept racial discrimination and hate.  Mr. Raymond suggests that Dill’s inability to accept the mistreatment of Tom Robinson stems from an innocent nature.  Dill’s innocent instinct does not understand societal expectations, behaviors deemed “acceptable” due to tradition, blind tolerance justified by convention; instead, his innocence leads him to view hate as hate, evil as evil, and cruelty as cruelty regardless of the practices and laws adopted by a corrupted a society.  Mr. Raymond recognizes Dill’s current state of innate innocence as a temporary stage, in which he can live guided by only conscience, untouched and uncorrupted by the knowledge and philosophies indidvuals acquire with age.  Once Dill reaches a certain age, his fury with hate and puzzlement over racism will fade; the society he will grow up in will teach that hate and racism are accepted social norms.  After years of observation, Mr. Raymond knows that eventually Dill will stop asking “why”, allowing himself to “come of age” and accept the present conditions as merely “the way things are”.  As he encounters racism and hate, Dill’s tears will no longer fall, for who cries at something that is expected and accepted?   

In this passage, Mr. Raymond suggests that “coming of age” is an abandonment of innocence, a surrender of independent thought and emotion and acceptance of the world in its current condition.  Mr. Raymond, married to a black woman and the father of children of mixed race, obviously lacks the racial prejudice and hate that is commonplace in Maycomb; however, his “coming of age” taught him to accept the racism around him and hide his beliefs in a paper sack of whiskey.  Rather than crying at the hate and racism, Mr. Raymond lives a charade, hiding behind alleged drunkenness to explain his incompatibility with Maycomb’s racist expectations.  Rather than fighting what he knows is wrong, life has taught Mr. Raymond to accept his corrupt world for what it is.  Once, Mr. Raymond probably cried the same tears as Dill; however, time and age dried these tears into a mask of tolerance.

There is no doubt in my mind that “coming of age” involves a loss of innocence.  Life strips indidvuals of ignorant bliss and confronts them with cruel, cold facts of reality.  However, in order to “come of age”, must one accept these facts as valid and reasonable.  When confronted with the world’s hate, must one simply accept this hate as a natural occurrence, an aspect of reality to be accepted and never challenged?  Certainly, this question is food for thought as one explores his or her own “coming of age” journey.